For fun, here's a photo of Hercules in the shower. Dig the goggles, baby!

It's the first day of school for Hercules today, our heroic first-grader! I'm pretty sure he'll start off just fine. I don't start to worry until the novelty has worn off and the honeymoon period is over with his new teacher. But I wrote the story for Rio as planned and we read it the last three nights. He immediately noticed that Max the Mighty was just like him (what a coincidence;), and we discussed the lessons in the story at great length. I wanted to post the story here, but it's kinda long. Maybe if enough people are interested I will make it public, so speak now or forever hold your peace. I gave a copy to Rio's teacher, too, at Meet Your Teacher Night. It seemed like kind of a weird thing to do, but I did it anyway. I told her it would explain Rio very well, which I thought would be a good idea since she wasn't familiar with any of his history yet. I want her to know what to expect.

I plan to write some more stories about Max that are geared to some other recurring issues that Hercules deals with on a regular basis. We'll see how it all goes.

The last couple of days have been nice in that I stayed home from work and got to spend some quality time with Hercules before school starts. We biked the MKT trail and made a birthday card for his Grampa in NH. And we got to play with our new puppy! Yep, we got another dog! His name is Chico. Check him out, he's the little black dog:

So that's been fun and er, messy, but he's still doing his puppy thing so I'm very forgiving. This morning I decided it was easier to simply remove the area rug from the living room, rather than attempt to clean it one more time. Because the spots that I treated previously still smell like pee and I'm pretty sure that's why he continues to go potty there. Luckily I wasn't overly attached to that rug anyway, especially since Bongo had chewed off the fringe in one corner.

When you have six kids and two dogs around, carpeting is just a headache. Floors are a mother's best friend!